Holy Trailer-rama, Batman. This is far from an official count, but so far we’ve got at least three trailers floating around for”Star Trek Into Darkness”, and surprise! The cumulative effect of these yields what self-respecting Vulcans will coolly and clinically describe as “badassssss!” Let’s have a look, shall we?
Trailer 1: December, 2012
Oh, Benedict Cumberbatch. Your scorching powers of awesome are made that much more impressive by your truly astounding name, perhaps the most English name ever minted since Englebert Humperdinck and Viscount Cyril St. Brrrfflllrrrgghfllrrggghh-on-Thames fought to the death in the Great English Name-Off of 1912.
The ‘Batch has established conclusively that he can make anything he touches turn to unfiltered, cask-aged unicorn tears, and while the new”Trek” would probably be as great as the last one with or without him (assuming you don’t harbor a reflexive fanboy hatred of that film), I am a hundred percent on board with his casting in the part of what IMDB calls “Khan (rumored).” His voice-over is spare and well-used here, and whoever edited this bad boy did a fine job of matching it to some excellent tense buildup/exploding!/people falling through things! action. It’s what Goldmember would refer to as “toyt.”
Trailer 2: February, 2013
Almost an entire extra minute in this one, but I like it the least of these three, in no small part because it leads with a cut from Sadly Singing Lady’s forthcoming album, Music From the Part Right Before Shit Jumps Off in Every Action Movie Made in the Past 15 years. (She and Middle Eastern-y Wailing Lady have carried on a savage battle for supremacy roughly since”Gladiator.”)
Notwithstanding the vocal track, it’s all about tone: Trailer 1 nails action vs. tension perfectly, and does so in half the time. Trailer 2 kind of wastes the extra minute with a voice-over of Bruce Greenwood crabbing on and on about what an irresponsible shit Captain Kirk is and how he’s gonna get literally everyone he’s ever met killed, et cetera. We hear only a smidgen of Cumberbatch (which is incidentally the title of BC-Batch’s forthcoming solo album), and by the time he shows up, there’s not enough room to re-create the sense of menace from Trailer 1, since by that point we’re basically reflecting on what a dick Kirk is for the duration.
Trailer 3: March, 2013
Kind of my favorite yet, as it’s all about the fun. We get Bruce Greenwood again, but only the humorous bits, and it hints at the whole “Kirk’s gonna get everybody into some shit again” thing without beating us to death with it. Plenty of fun new action shots, a delightful bit of Kirk-Spock banter, some Kirk-Bones cliff-diving wackiness, Scotty and a giant fish, and much more. It’s basically a teaser, but I found it way more compelling, even without the liberal dose of Ominous Cumberbatch (second solo album) included in the first two. We also get a minor hint about why Khan (rumored) is such an insanely dangerous and feared person: “By now all of you have heard what happened in London,” a voice-over informs us as we see him looming ominously in broad daylight. Which makes perfect sense to me: Something happened in London! He’s English! Case closed!
Anyway, it’s pleasing stuff, and provides an object lesson in movie marketing: Pick your trailer theme and stick with it. Also, make sure that theme is something other than what a fucking asshole your protagonist is.
A final note about Trailer 3: On its YouTube page, it includes a wonderful comment by some dude named SuperRobiWanKenobi: “So much jumping down!” A-.
